My Second Hometown.

My Second Hometown

Forty years ago, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, but we had a very strong will to develop our country. As people cannot make anything with nothing, we needed money to advance our country, but we did not have anything, except “people”. Unlike Korea, Germany lacked labor in certain fields such as nursing and mining at that time, so our government decided to export people to Germany as nurses and miners. This is how my aunt went to Germany, and it changed her life enormously. She had to learn German and could no longer Korean food. Moreover, she became alone for the first time. It made her very independent and strong. However, it not only affected my aunt’s life but also my family’s life. It made my family feel like Germany was our second hometown.

First, my family always paid attention to Germany. Germany is not close to our country geographically or historically, so this country is out of our attention. However, my family was different. If something related to Germany was released on TV, we never missed it, and talked about it all day long. Sometimes, it continued to the next day. Furthermore, when world cup was coming, my family’s attention to Germany peaked. In Korea, people love soccer, so the world cup is the biggest festival for us like Carnival for Brazilians. During the world cup season, everyone went out and cheered the Korean soccer team, but my family cheered the German team. If the German team won, we were delighted as if our home team had won.

Another effect of my aunt living in Germany was that we could have German product that we could not buy in Korea. My aunt came to Korea every two or three years to meet her family, and it meant a lot of gifts for my family. She usually brought kitchenware to my mother, so our kitchen was full of German kitchenware, which was too expensive for my family to afford. Also, she gave my brothers and me German cookies and chocolate. Most of them were so delicious. They had a taste we had never had in Korea. Among those presents, my favorite was Nutella which was chocolate jam. I loved it so much, so I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and even dinner. Sometimes, I showed off to my friends that I had this tasty jam, and they always envied me.

The final benefit for my family was that we could learn German. My aunt always believed that her kids had to know about where they were from, so she sent them to Korea every two years until they graduated from high school. While they were in Korea, they usually stayed in my house. As I mentioned above, Germany is not a familiar country to us, so people rarely learn German as a foreign language. However, my family naturally learned German by living with my cousins while they learned Korean from us. I found out at that time that a word “bank” in German had the same spelling as English although it had slightly different pronunciation. Unfortunately, now I almost forgot everything, except “Danke”.

It has been more than forty years since my aunt left Korea. When she went to Germany, she was twenty-three, but now she is sixty-five. Everything has changed as much as my aunt’s face changed over forty years. We can contact people around the globe through the internet as if they are next to us. Also, we can go anywhere on the earth in one night. In other words, the world is becoming the one, which refers to globalization. Because of the globalization, the uniqueness of nationality or hometown is slowly disappearing. However, unlike the trend, my family has still considered Germany as our second hometown thanks to the exclusive memories about Germany, and we will never change our mind no matter what happens.